Renegade:
I'm booting Ubuntu off of a USB drive and it won't connect to the network or USB mouse. Grrr...

Anyone have any tips?

Shades:
BIOS/UEFI have options nowadays to boot with no USB device support, partial USB device support (default=allows you to boou from USB devices and have a keyboard, but not much else) or full USB device support. This is done to keep the time to boot as low as possible, while still supporting the essentials in case one needs to do low-level repair jobs.